After a Year of Carnage in Ukraine, There Is Still No End in Sight

Trump’s Unbreakable Curse • “CNN Is Not For Sale” • Tussles at the Times

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After a Year of Carnage in Ukraine, There Is Still No End in Sight

We have officially entered into the second year of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but there is still no end in sight. Having spent a full year bombing Ukrainian cities and killing thousands of innocent civilians in the process, Vladimir Putin’s methods are “almost medieval in nature,” as Janine di Giovanni, a veteran war correspondent and cofounder of the Reckoning Project, wrote in a devastating dispatch. Charting the decimation from Grozny to Aleppo to Mariupol, she wrote, “To conquer, he must destroy and, in the process, kill, kill, and then kill some more. The consequence, in many cases, is to drive people to the edge of madness.”

Back in the US, the Republican Party is still sorting out whether it’ll remain in the thrall of Donald Trump. While a number of the GOP’s presidential prospects have sought to break out of the former president’s mold, Molly Jong-Fast, for one, is skeptical, writing in her latest column, “I just don’t understand how these more normal candidates break the fever that is Trumpism.” But unfortunately for top Republicans like Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, loosening Trump’s grip on the party, as Eric Lutz observed, might be vital to the party’s success.

Meanwhile, this past week was also chock-full of media drama at the The Hive: Charlotte Klein scooped up an internal kerfuffle at The New York Times between high-profile staffers and the NewsGuild of New York over the paper’s coverage of transgender issues. And on Thursday, just after CNN anchor Don Lemon had returned from his time-out over sexist comments, Joe Pompeo threw cold water on rumors that the network’s former president, Jeff Zucker, was mulling a takeover. Thanks for reading and see you on Monday.

—Jon Skolnik, associate editor

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